Episodes 800 and 801 of Toronto Mike'd each featured TSN's Rod Black. Upon first glance, it may look like a dreaded podcast two-parter. Several podcasts I follow will take a longer episode and edit it into two (or three or four or...) separate episodes. I assure you, this is something I'll never do.
By its very nature, there is no time limitation on a podcast. It's not like a terrestrial radio or television program where the show has to fit into a 22 or 44 minute box. A podcast episode can be five minutes or five hours.
The glory of a podcast is the pause button, fully controlled by the listener. The listener is in complete control of how they digest the content, or whether they digest the content. Taking a two hour episode and editing it into two one hour episodes is a great disservice to listeners. Give them the entire thing and let them decide when they break.
The only reason to break a podcast episode into multiple parts is to benefit the podcaster by:
- Artificially inflating the episode count
- Doubling (or tripling or quadrupling or...) the sponsor mentions
Now back to episodes 800 and 801 of Toronto Mike'd with Rod Black... This was not a two-part episode but two different episodes. They were two separate conversations recorded on two different days. Neither were edited.
If you're a podcaster with a longer episode on your hands, and you're considering carving it up into multiple episodes, please consider your listeners and give it to them all in one glorious blob. They can take it.
